I wanna see the others on the big top five
by irnan
Summary: The only thing this town has going for it is the record store. No way they're staying more than one night.


_This is a disclaimer._

_**AN: **So I saw __'The Boat That Rocked_', and then I picked up _'Born To Run'_ for a tenner at the train station, and then there was this. Set sometime in late S1. Title courtesy of Rob Gordon of Championship Vinyl.

**I wanna see the others on the big top five**

Here's the thing: Dean really likes Bruce Springsteen.

It's a terrible thing to admit for someone who wears a battered leather jacket and drives a Chevy Impala and has this Midwestern drawl thing goin' on that he can't seem to get rid of, although he's also the first to admit he's never tried too hard, but the fact is that liking Springsteen makes him, as Sammy would put it, a walking cliché of an American blue collar working class guy, and Dean hates being a cliché.

Of course, that in turn is tied up with his pathological avoidance of conformity of any kind, but that whole issue is a completely different and much more complicated kettle of fish, so Dean mostly tries not to think about it.

So, again: liking the Boss makes Dean a walking cliché, which is not an image he particularly likes to carry with him. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, but he's standing in a record store in a small town in Indiana, and there's a whole rack of Springsteen tapes half-price, and Dean hasn't listened to _Born To Run_ since Dad sent him to New Orleans and took all the Springsteen tapes with him when he disappeared right afterwards.

Dean chews obsessively on his bottom lip for a few minutes. Then he turns away and dives into the rock section. He's not entirely sure why liking Springsteen makes him more of a cliché than liking, for instance, Zeppelin or the Stones, but it does, and so he stands in front of the rack and thumbs through a stack of _Beatles_ tapes without ever developing the intention of buying one (Dad listens to the _Beatles_. Dean likes 'em, sure, but... yeah.), and feels inwardly torn.

He's also aware he's being a bit ridiculous and possibly even melodramatic, but it's been a bad day. He feels like wallowing. It's not like he's ever done that kinda thing on a scale remotely similar to that of certain other Winchesters he could name. He's just fed up this morning. The weather's terrible and the coffee's worse and even his baby seems to be in a bad mood. She's been grumbling at him all day, even after he stopped for gas and checked her over as thoroughly as Dad taught him how.

_The Beatles_ are boring. Dean moves on to the next letter, fingers tracing lightly over the tops of tapes that have probably been sitting in these shelves since the seventies. When he holds his hand up, his fingertips are dusty.

Dean likes record stores – the smaller the better. They're warm and friendly, on the whole, and while there are a lot of music snobs out there, Dean himself among them, record stores still manage to miss the middle-class intellectual pretensions a lot of bookstores have. The clerks will talk to him for hours, and the few girls that work in these kinds of stores are almost all uniformly awesome.

It's the music, Dean thinks. Your taste in music says everything about you, reveals your very soul, which is why he'll never stop despairing at the stuff Sammy listens to. Somewhere deep inside him, Dean can't help but feel that Sam's _Fall Out Boy_ albums condemned him to hell long before any of this demon crap went down.

In his more rational moments, Dean feels sorta guilty for thinking crap like that, but dusty, sunlit record stores with rows of tapes waiting for him and posters of the Boss on the wall are never very conducive to Dean's more rational moments. He geeks out over places like this one a little too much.

Ah, Janis. Mom used to listen to Janis, didn't she? Dean thinks he can remember her singing along to _Piece of my Heart_... but Dean thinks he can remember a lot of things about Mom. He knows himself that not all of them are necessarily real memories.

Not Janis.

_Echo and the Bunnymen_. Dumbass name for a rock band. And they're British; shoulda known.

The paint is peeling off the window frame behind him, and the glass is obscured by dust and the tatters of scotch tape still holding down the corners of old posters that have been torn away. Nevertheless, the sunlight seeps through, and Dean catches himself staring at the dust motes in the sunbeam instead of the _L-R_ rack underneath the window. He gives himself an irritated little shake.

Out the front, the clerk is on the phone. Sounds like he's annoyed about something, although Dean can't catch the words. Probably a late delivery. Or maybe his ex is refusing to send him his stuff back. There's a girl at the counter now, got here while Dean was off with the fairies. She's dyed her hair a bright, obnoxious pink, and Dean thinks that that can't make her life at high school any easier. She's also digging under her nails with what looks like a mutilated ball point pen.

Dean shudders inwardly. Imagine going up there now to pay for a record, and getting all the filth she's prying out from under her nails on it. He hasn't got a living room to put a proper record player in, but if he did, the accompanying collection of vinyl would be the most important and looked-after item in the entire _house_.

The hypothetical house, this is. The one he doesn't have and never will.

_Lynard Skynard_ gets poked at listlessly. It's not a good day for buying music, Dean decides. He doesn't care enough, not today.

There actually was a record player once. Sam was seventeen, and they'd somehow got stuck in Oklahoma for a few months. Dad rented a house, and Sam went to school, and Dean did research and practiced his Latin grammar, which, yeah, OK, it always did kinda suck, although not as badly as Sam likes to pretend.

And one day he'd been wandering through the neighbourhood, and there it was.

A yard sale.

"It's my husband's crap," the woman told him, lounging in a deck chair with an oversized hat on and a Campari Soda in her hand. It was bright red, and looked like a glass of watered down blood. "He'll be furious, of course, and then demand a cut of the proceeds, but I figure if he's gonna miss his flight home from Miami to stay with some bottle blonde beach bitch with surgical enhancements, then I can take a day off work to make some room in my own damn house. What do you say to that, Handsome?"

Dean had looked up at her. The sun was beating down on the back of his neck and his eyes hurt with the glare, but he'd still been perfectly able to tell that the record player was a beauty, and the milk crate of records that went with it was better still.

He almost felt sorry for the guy in Miami; but then, who left their records with their bitchy ex wife when they left home? The guy must have known what she'd probably do to them.

Still, the sight of _Zeppelin III_ sitting in the crate, looking up at him accusingly, was almost enough to make Dean back away and tell her to find someone else to collude in making her ex the unluckiest man on earth.

Almost enough, that is, because damn, she had gorgeous legs, housewife or not, and by the time Dean left with the record player and the milk crate, the grating, whiny tone had been completely fucked out of her.

Which was him being smug and vulgar, but hello, was that _Beggar's Banquet_ in the back?

Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing had been that Dad was delighted to have the record player, even if he hadn't said so in so many words, and Dean and John had spent a lot of perfectly contented hours listening to it.

Sam had slammed doors and bought himself a Discman. Dean distinctly remembered the burst of pride he'd gotten when he realised that he had no idea where Sam had got the money from. Sneaky little bastard.

Of course, a year later, he'd snuck off to Stanford, but that was another episode of _The Winchester Tragedies._

Ahem.

Dean wonders briefly if he was hard up enough on the music front to just buy a Kansas album he didn't have yet and pretend that he'd come in for that all along, and then the door opens, and he gets the sudden urge to crawl under the racks and disappear, because Sammy just walked in, and there was no way Dean was admitting they were related – or even acquainted – if Sam's come in here to buy some craptastic band with a name like _Foo Fighters_.

So maybe he's a bit more of a music snob than he'd always thought.

"Hi there," Sam says cheerfully to the girl at the desk. The look she gives him is flat and hostile, and the mutilated ball point pen she'd mistaken for an article of personal hygiene is twirling rather ominously in her fingers.

Sam just reaches past the desk and picks _Born To Run_ off the Springsteen-for-half-price rack.

The girl picks it up between finger and thumb like it was toxic, and rattles the cash register for a couple of minutes before naming the price. Her voice is as flat as her expression, and Dean thinks she's doing a pretty good impression of a Terminator, all things considered. He'll have to congratulate her on his way out.

Since when does Sam like Springsteen?

"You know, people have made other music since the seventies," the girl says at last, as Sam hands her the money.

He grins. "Tell that to my brother. This is for him."

Something twitches in the girl's face. "My sister," she said calmly, "listens to Bryan Adams."

Sam snorts. "Yeah, that's worse," he says, still grinning a little, and just like that he's gone, and Dean's standing squashed against a rack of tapes in a corner of a record store trying not to be seen by his annoying little brother who has no taste in music and just bought him a Springsteen tape for no good reason.

So that evening he makes sure they have dinner at some cheap Italian place instead of a diner, because Sam loves lasagne, and afterwards there's a bar and beer and a few games of pool and the next day Dean listens to _Born to Run_ for six hours straight, and Sam does that thing where he curls into the corner between the seat and the door of the Impala and buries his nose in a book and pretends not to enjoy himself, what with the windows being open and the wind in their hair and Springsteen thrumming through the car, an aural memory of Dad, and of home.


End file.
